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Mickey Luckoff & KGO
- Thread starter DrAkbar
- Start date
Mickey forgot to update the KGO sound at the earliest part of the New Millenium. What got such enviable numbers in the 90’s was too bland as well as a bit too “fake intelligentsia” for the more contentious feel of a new time. I often thought that Mickey believed that KGO set the taste and thinking of the market rather than realizing that for about two decades KGO had simply matched the mood of the Bay Area.
Mickey thought that the audience followed him, when, in reality, he was unknowingly following it!
Mickey thought that the audience followed him, when, in reality, he was unknowingly following it!
It's a catch-22. You don't want to risk screwing it up by fixing it, so you leave it alone. And then it sinks from neglect and dies of irrelevance.
And, as you've pointed out, it wasn't until PPM's arrival that it became obvious just how old the audience was and just how much of the TSL was not really there.
Mickey was never gonna be the guy to fix KGO. It would have required a new GM early enough for it to matter. And ABC didn't have the courage to do that, either.
And the fear of any manager was to do even the smallest thing that might poke a little hole in the dije.
And KGO did not have secondary cumers… those who did not enter “”less favorite station” listening in their diary. Most stations showed as much as a third in extra come (which made up for all stations’ loss of longer TSL So KGO lost TSL and had no compensation with added P2 or P3 listening.
Sort of not wanting to be the guy who ordered replacement of the rivets at the base of the Eiffel Tower.
And then blames it all on the new ownership. Who were swindled into believing the hype, rather than seeing the reality.
I was involved in talk radio in a number of larger markets at the time and I can not say that I fully realized the “mood change” and did not sense people at events like the “Talkers” conventions making those observations, either. The changes occurred so subtly that we did not sense them until it was, sometimes, too late.
I think that's some of what KSFO was for. One could argue that Luckoff hedged his bets appropriately, but still didn't expect the outcome where KSFO replaced KGO. Moreover, he didn't seem to have a real plan for KGO.
The peak of the first Bay Area tech boom was 1999 and 2000. I was among the many tech workers new to the Bay Area at that time. I've often described my reaction when trying to listen to KGO at the time. It seemed old-fashioned and out of touch. It's little wonder to me that the station's audience aged out; it was already happening back in '99.
The first boom began the changes that I describe as "chasing out the really interesting people" that made the Bay Area culture what it was. After the second boom and then the financial crisis of 2008, that culture increasingly tended to be a monoculture, dominated by technology companies that, themselves, were becoming less diverse in outlook, and that was increasingly preoccupied with money.
It doesn't just happen in radio. It takes a lot of courage, and a high risk appetite, to alter what's working in the present day even if you see that it's not sustainable in the long term. But few enterprises are measured on a long-term basis, so the bias is toward maintaining short-term success. Such companies also become resistant to new ideas and entangled in a growing set of policies and procedures. This phenomenon even comes to the tech companies that presently express such concerns about being supplanted. Facebook's a good example. They extended their lifespan by buying Instagram, which appeals to younger demographics than Facebook. But that's aging, too. And note that Facebook bought Sun Microsystems' former campus. Sun was riding high in 1999. Eleven years later, it was absorbed by Oracle (yuck). Oracle's day will come, too. The best that companies in this position can hope for is to carve out a steady, sustaining, boring business with slow growth prospects at best. Oracle is on its way there; IBM already is. The analogy for radio is that station/programming operators will have to find their own niches and continue to be very cost-conscious, because you can't control revenues but you can control costs to some extent.
PPM was a real eye opener, but not his. Mickey wisely got out well in advance of KGO's ultimate demise. And to think, before it became KSFO, KGO was a sports gambling formatted station. YIKES!
Now can someone splain why the opening shot of the interview is of Luckoff thumbing through his phone messages as if he had something better to do?
Now can someone splain why the opening shot of the interview is of Luckoff thumbing through his phone messages as if he had something better to do?
I recall a convention of the FM Broadcasters Association where Gabbert was on a panel and mentioned how so many groups ignored FM (like Storz), spun off FMs (Like Storer) or failed to see the future of them in areas where AM had better coverage. A lot of FMs were bought by shrewd broadcasters from old-line companies that felt that "if FM had gotten nowhere in its first 30 years, it would never happen, ever."
People talk about big corporate radio as though it didn't exist before 1996. But ABC Radio was big corporate radio in its time. Amazingly they did a fairly good job with FM in all of their markets except San Francisco. From what I've read here, I gather the blame should all go to Mickey. He didn't see it coming. He and Sklar had their heads firmly in the past and couldn't imagine any use for FM.
ABC inherited a great combo from Star in DC and managed to do a great job with the combo, making WMAL-FM into a powerhouse Q107. It was a consistent ratings winner for years.
True too also say ABC were to buy an FM station in the 1990's-2000's who would they have bought at that time if the were allowed to get an FM signal at that timeframe. Would they be where they are today and how would the lineup be back then.
For many years broadcasters poo-pooed FM due to terrain issues in the Bay Area. KGO-AM's coverage is monstrous, so why fool around with FM was the thinking. Ha!
We've talked about this here several times before, that SF was really ahead of the curve on the FM explosion in the 60s. There was so much music happening at the time, and it couldn't fit on the AM stations at the time. So you had pioneers like Tom Donohue who worked in both radio & records, and could see the opportunities. But you also had a group who were very happy with the status quo. Mickey was one of them. KGO-FM was a little late to the party.
By that time, Disney owned them, and Disney wasn't very interested in radio. That was part of the problem with their AMs.
For crying out loud, it was 1983. It should have been apparent by then, even to the dullest dimwit, that FM had a solid future ahead of it.
But anyway. Contemporary accounts cited ownership restrictions as the reason for the sale. ABC had seven FMs but only six AMs. Houston's KXYZ had been sold in 1979. So, the story went, selling off the San Francisco FM would allow ABC to pick up an AM/FM combo in another market to hit the 7 AM/7 FM ownership limit of the time. I don't recall that that ever happened, though. And in 1986, ABC sold KSRR(FM) in Houston to Malrite.
What gets lost in this was that FM was a one-size-fits-all for most of the ABC O&O FMs---album rock.
But it was tried twice at KSFX and went nowhere. That station's only success came from being four years ahead of the curve on disco. They just didn't see a path and Bill Weaver was offering them a lot of money.
KSRR in Houston tried all sorts of things before settling into AOR and adopting the KSRR calls and the 97 Rock slogan around 1980. It tried to grab audience from heritage rocker KLOL (KTRH's FM adjunct) and had a modicum of success, though KLOL continued to do well. The research folks at KLOL considered KSRR to be their main competition, until Malrite bought 97 Rock from ABC and transitioned it, first to CHR, then later to hot AC. The Mediatrix profile of the Houston market in 1987 has some details about the twists and turns at that station. It may just have been that AOR was the default choice for the ABC outlets. That said...
By that time, it wasn't KSFX, though. It's not clear to me how much of a free hand Mickey had in the situation; success with the AM could well have given him a degree of freedom in programming, but I'm sure the decision to sell wasn't his, though he may have had a say in it.
The situation with KGO-FM reminds me of the way Bob Hyland treated KMOX-FM in St. Louis. Until CBS corporate essentially took away the FM station from him, it was running an automated format when it wasn't being used for sports play-by-play that didn't fit on the AM. Friends of mine who worked at KMOX said the FM was often referred to there as "the closet". Later, as the FM station was starting to transition to "hot hits", one friend exclaimed to me, "we don't know what's going on downstairs any more!" In the case of St. Louis, corporate intervention came at a good time and was productive; that didn't seem to be the case in San Francisco.
Yeah, it was KGO-FM at that point, but simulcasting morning drive and clearing ABC Talkradio wasn't getting them anywhere either. The point is that ABC, possibly more than any other group, had zero ideas beyond album rock for their FMs (Houston not withstanding).
KSFX/KGO-FM was a problem child. The early 70s "Rock 'n Stereo" that worked for most of the rest of the chain didn't work for them. An FM Top 40 based on WABC's format didn't work for them.
Disco/Dance was a fluke that worked at a moment when the large and growing gay community was the core audience for the format, which really was based on what was hot in clubs, and the Black population of the Bay Area was at its peak (13.5%).
When that burned out, it morphed into more of a Top 40, but went nowhere and by fall of 1980 it was back to AOR, but the KSAN audience abandoned by the flip to Country was small and chose KMEL, KOME and KSJO instead.
There's really nothing that indicates that ABC would have ever figured it out, or that putting KGO on FM at some point would have helped the station's long-term survival. $5.5 million ($16.9 million adjusted for inflation) probably looked pretty good to ABC in early '84.
And really, 103.7 FM has been an underperformer in the market apart from its earliest smooth jazz days as KKSF.
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Remind me of when KFOG flipped from easy-listening to what ultimately became AAA. Was that before or after KSFX became KGO-FM? Do you think that had an effect?
KFOG always seemed something of an artifice to me, but people did respond to it.
iHeart seems to have carved out a halfway-decent business with it, but it took them a while.
At one time, the San Francisco market was distinctive, and the radio dial reflected that. What worked there might not work elsewhere, and vice versa. I think that distinctiveness has mostly gone away. There's no (commercial) radio station these days that makes me think, "only in San Francisco".
KFOG was owned by General Electric when it flipped to rock in 1982. Talk about big corporate radio. At the time, GE was one of the biggest corporations in the world.
The thing they did that was smart was they hired someone who knew the market, and understood the rock music community. They stayed away from corporate rock and did the local thing. There was a great local music community in SF that Tom Donohue was tied in with. But when he died, and Metromedia flipped KSAN to country, there was a big hole that KFOG filled. They did local broadcasts of the annual BAMMY awards. That really endeared them with the locals. It was just a well run radio station. Susquehanna bought the station in 1989, and they were another great company.
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